There are nearly 1.6 billion active Facebook users around the world, so what’s the chance of you being connected to any of them? Actually, according to Facebook Research, pretty close: 3.57 degrees close.
The data was released in celebration of the so-called Friends Day (made up by Facebook to recognize its birthday) and in honor of its 12th birthday, the social network says “each person in the world [using Facebook] is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half other people.” The concept is similar to Six Degrees of Separation (or Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, if you prefer), except in the Facebook universe, we are a tighter-knit family.
Facebook says the number is shrinking. When its researchers, along with those at Cornell and the University of Milan, studied the data in 2011, the degrees of separation was 3.74. Naturally, as more people sign up, that number gets smaller. (And no, Facebook isn’t dead; according to its recent earnings call, the user base has actually increased, thanks to a shift toward mobile computing.)
To find yours, head to this blog post (you’ll need to be logged into Facebook). Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a 3.17 degrees of separation, but COO Sheryl Sandberg is much closer with 2.92. Most people average between 2.9 and 4.2.
Facebook says analyzing the data is not easy. “Calculating degrees of separation in a network with hundreds of billions of edges is a monumental task, because the number of people reached grows very quickly with the degree of separation,” the researchers wrote in the blog post, where they detailed how they conducted the process. And, they had to run the computation 1.6 billion times, for every Facebook user.
Of course, in the real world, relationships aren’t as close, but on Facebook, you are most likely friends with someone, or a friend of a friend, or a friend of a friend of a friend.
If you looked at your Facebook feed anytime today, you most likely saw a Friends Day video at the top of the page. “These videos stitch together special moments with your friends in a short film that can be edited and shared.
With the social network so intertwined with our lives, it’s easy to forget that there was a time before Facebook. To mark the birthday, Comedy Central’s @midnight show aired a segment that spawned the #BeforeFacebookI hashtag, where people are sharing memories from their pre-Facebook-era days on the namesake social network, as well as on Twitter. Punch in the hashtag in the search bar and read some, or share your own.
It’s hard to believe there was a time before Facebook, but we promise it’s true. Play #BeforeFacebookI with us!
Posted by @midnight on Tuesday, February 2, 2016
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Instagram is testing a new format for long-form videos called Features. It allows select creators to upload horizontal videos running up to 90 minutes long. Instagram has already tested the new format with creators in Brazil, and now, it's expanding to tens of thousands of creators across the US.
How will Instagram's new Features format work?